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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Why are my taxes paying for some random course? How is this a sensible use of government money? Why not a course on flower arranging? Which "entrepreneur" wangled this boondoggle? What vast sums are they getting paid for a few tweetsie javascript animations of knn?

In short, WTF?

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Well maybe you would need a course on text comprehension, perhaps a finish government could pay for it. The article links to the press release that could answer all your questions.

https://eu2019.fi/en/article/-/asset_publisher/suomen-eu-puh...

The cost of the initiative, a total of €1 679 000, will be funded from the budget of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland.

So unless you happen to work in Finland it is not your money. Also its rather low amount of money anyway and if it trained even one future AI researcher it would probably pay for itself.

What are you even talking about. Universities across Europe already enable EU students to take their courses. Elements of AI was available for Finnish citizens, and they just opened it to more people: the course was already there and already made. It has been made in collaboration with a Finnish company made Reaktor. This course's goal was to enable and teach people about AI, for people to apply it where possible (examples given were dentists, etc.), even in small amount. They're a small country, and bet on teaching people to be able to use it in more jobs, to be more efficient. I don't understand your problem with it.

AFAIK the course was originally created as a co-operation by University of Helsinki and a private IT consulting company. The cost of translating the course to all official languages of EU, besides those for which it is already available, will be funded the Finnish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment.

Source: https://vnk.fi/en/article/-/asset_publisher/1410877/suomi-in...

Besides, the same question you posed above could be asked of any publicly funded curriculum, like most EU universities and public schools. I don't think making an entry-level course on important topic that is a mystery to most people available to all European public at large is at all bad use of tax money.

> How is this a sensible use of government money?

What, education?

No, translation to other languages. It's kinda strange that Finnish government pays for translations to Spanish or French or German. If I were a Finnish citizen that would definitely that wouldn't sit well with me.

Your taxes pay for a ton of courses of questionable use and always have. The amount of money that is wasted on both useful but also useless courses just in schools or out-of-school but targeted at kids is many orders of magnitude higher than for this.

And in this case, I suspect they are getting a bit more bang for their buck here, though I can't tell if it's still more of a waste or not.

A technologically-literate population is a great thing and should be encouraged. We all, too often, complain how others are technologically illiterate.

What leads you to believe this is being paid for by your taxes?

It says so in the first and main block of text on the page.

Seriously, you expect him to not be Finnish or an EU inhabitant and there not going any EU euros into this project? And his point seems quite right. There are so many MOOCS in this segment, we don't need a government picking winners and paying for translation in a time when a very large part of tertiary education in Europe is already in English. On top of that, given that it's the Finish presidency choosing Helsinki university, I doubt they've followed the procurement rules the EU dictates.

It is just a course that was already made and already in English, available online and that some people were picked to take to try it the first year. EU universities are already open to every EU students, I find it quite smart to market it this way. It's a just a free course to educate yourself about AI, in any fields of work, and how to apply it where you can. The translation will be paid by the Finnish state. I mean, how can people be unhappy about free education ? This MOOC was done and proven to educate people, Finnish people like it, so they opened it to EU. Picking winner in what sense ?

You doubt it?

As you describe yourself as an academic, we might ask the same question about all courses available at public financed institutions across the world.

sure you're leaving anyway..

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